I’m not old; I just play an old guy on Mile High Sports. (I’ll be 40 in 2018.*)
I don’t know when it happened, or where, or in whatever context that it occurred. All I know is it was sudden and came like a bolt out of the blue. It was a fleeting thought that passed through my brain while watching a basketball game on TNT about four years ago:
Why is this team taking so many threes? Get the ball down low!
Whoa! Where the the hell did that come from? Like anything else random, I ignored the thought and I assumed that it was just me being in an in a poor mood that evening. It really bugged me, though. I’ve never had that thought, an ‘old man thought’, while watching an NBA game before. Even in the late 1990s — when basketball consisted of dumping the ball down into the post and the occasional fisticuffs.
The thought that I assumed was random kept persisting. Ugh … use more of the court than just the three and the layup! I couldn’t get away from it, and it got worse and worse.
It’s not quite open contempt for the way basketball has gone; it’s more of a feeling that I don’t understand where the game has gone, and I can’t get my arms around it. Now, I think I know why.
We tend to identify with the era we grew up with, and the 1990s was mine. A decade that seems anathema to the current one. You take any tour of Twitter and you will see tweet after tweet bashing the era as boring or tedious. Meanwhile the “enlightened” era of pace-and-space is held up as the best example of basketball. I just didn’t see it… and maybe I still don’t.
Unlike the Christmas night broadcast on TNT between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Minnesota Timberwolves — featuring Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith — I have been reintroduced to winning, modern basketball in the form of the Denver Nuggets, rather than giving in to my inclination to question why they have centers shooting so many threes.
The beauty and poetry of Nikola Jokic, Gary Harris, Jamal Murray and more has reintroduced me to the game in a way I never thought possible. At least in a way that I can appreciate the game as it is now, rather than the way I want it to be. I’ll never fully appreciate the modern NBA way, and I don’t think I’m meant to.
However, I can go with the flow. As the Nuggets battled the Timberwolves on Wednesday night — coming back from double-digits down in the second half to send the game into overtime — I found what it is that made me a fan of the NBA in the first place. The child-like joy in experiencing a full-tilt Nuggets game with high stakes that makes you appreciate the game in a way that no other sport can match. The Nuggets eventually fell in overtime, but the fight and resilience the Nuggets showed was infectious.
I suppose that’s what I missed more than anything: emotional attachment to a team in a way that connects me to them. Falling in love with a team is part of the fan experience, and we sometimes forget that we all start as fans. Yes, I’m a 1990’s basketball fan, and I prefer that style of basketball over the chuck-and-duck style of modern NBA basketball, but I love this team. I love these Nuggets. This particular iteration of this squad has re-connected me to what I remember about being a younger fan. That makes me want to go with the flow and understand that everything — while in no way being what I want it to be — can still be amazing just the way it is.
My favorite team is the 1994 Nuggets — and I don’t believe another team can ever take its place in my heart. It’s what connected me to the NBA as a fan and caused me to fall in love with 1990s basketball. That’s in my DNA now. But I look at the 2017 Denver Nuggets and think that maybe I can learn to appreciate the game again as a fan. I believe that this is what I’ve been missing since the NBA changed its style. I’ve found my love as a fan again, and that is something that I’ll always cherish.
*I’m serious … 40 isn’t old.